Merry Christmas

Sent our Christmas card to the printer's Sunday night (December 5) . . . 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

 

Read Daily

If you read for 30 minutes a day, that's a good habit.  

If you read something challenging for 30 minutes a day, that's a better habit.

Here are some tidbits for your mind to nibble on:

1. The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The lectures that Richard Feynman delivered at the California Institute of Technology between 1961 and 1963 are inspirational. His book, Six Easy Pieces, is a compilation of those considered to be most accessible. Here are links to these six lectures (If these whet your interest, the California Institute of Technology has generously posted all 115 of his lectures on physics):
1. Atoms in Motion (Volume I, Chapter 1) (audio)
2. Basic Physics (Volume I, Chapter 2) (audio)
3. The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences (Volume I, Chapter 3) (audio)
4. Conservation of Energy (Volume I, Chapter 4) (audio)
5. The Theory of Gravitation (Volume I, Chapter 7) (audio)
6. Quantum Behavior (Volume I, Chapter 37)
2. coursera offers over 7,000 online courses:
1. Creative Writing: The Craft of Plot
2. Writing for Young Readers
3. Meditation
4. Greek and Roman Mythology
5. Songwriting
6. Modern Art and Ideas
3. MIT Opencourseware (OCW): Provides access to over 2500 courses. A few that catch my attention:
1. The Supernatural in Music, Literature and Culture
2. Fundamentals of Music
3. Harmony and Counterpoint
4. Introduction to Musical Composition
5. Playwriting
6. The Creative Spark
7. Introduction to the Visual Arts
8. Language and mind
4. Harvard offers some free online courses:
1. Masterpieces of World Literature (available through March 15, 2022)
2. Shakespeare's Hamlet: the Ghost (available through April 1, 2022)
3. Causal Diagrams: Draw Your Assumptions Before Your Conclusions (hosted by edX)
5. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

As I am compiling this list of lectures and articles to read I realize that I may be motivated enough to 'interact' with the content.  This means taking notes, writing thoughts and describing feelings that the readings incite. Which leads to

1. Doing research:
1. Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
2. Writing and Citation Guides: 
1. Penn State University libraries
2. scribbr (a commercial editing and proofing site)
3. Evaluating resources: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose (The CRAAP test)

Music . . . a late start

At 73 I'm finally learning music.

I didn't grow up with music. My generation didn't have cell phones and ear buds that let you live, 24/7 in mystical musical garden. Our generation had the 78's and funky 45's. But a record player didn't germinate in my room. Comic books blossomed there.

My musical journey has been an intermittent waiting at bus stops but not getting on. In high school, I was intrigued by the Beatles but was gobsmacked by the hysteria that cocooned them. In college, a dorm mate was an avid Bob Dylan fan, but I didn't have a clue of who Bob was. I had a room mate who loved Ray Charles and we'd go bar hoping in Baton Rouge while he sang Hit the Road Jack. In the Army I enjoyed a weed enhanced ride on the Staten Island ferry and the New York subway to become momentarily mesmerized by Woodstock, the movie, before a downer in the third hour caused me to ruminate about what's it all about. After that I found myself dolefully perking up when He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother or Bridge Over Troubled Waters played on the radio in the barracks. I met my future wife, Chris, in Belgium and  American Pie became "our song" because of it's subtle Louisiana back flavor. We got married in Baton Rouge, so Me and Bobby McGee is one of our favorites. Chris was on the 'bus'; she saw the Rolling Stones before one of them became a magazine. 

My wife introduced me to Harry Chapin, Queen, Procol Harum, The Lovin' Spoonful, Blood Sweat and Tears, Cream, The Byrds, Fleetwood Mack. We gravitated toward folk music and, when we moved to Tennessee, country.

Recently I developed an itch to make music.  It began two months ago. 

I bought my son and daughter electronic violins. I have this fantasy that one of my grandchildren might end up playing.  Truth be told, it was me who wanted a violin, but watching my son fiddle with the tuning (unintentional pun) and noticing that the fret was fretless made me realize that I needed something a bit less uncontrolled. Hello Mr Yamaha Keyboard.

Keyboard-san

After making Keyboard-san comfortable in a corner, I proceeded to do my normal bit of sabotaging . . . I got books.

Lots of books!

All sorts of books:

• Piano for Adults; 
• Piano for kids, 
• How to read Music, 
• How to Read Music for Dummies; 
• Music Theory 1; 
• Music Theory 101; 
• Music Theory for Dummies

I call this sabotage because I know, 

really really know,

that in order to learn music, 

I 

HAVE

TO

PLAY

MUSIC

Reading about music isn't MUSIC!

But I ignored this wise part of myself, paradoxically force feeding my brain musical wisdom by signing up for coursera Fundamental Music Theory and binging on Great Courses musical offerings.

I rationalized the book buying, the coursera, the binge learning as a way to DEVELOP A GAME PLAN. Imagine my surprise to discover, when I finally started practicing with Piano for Adults and taking advantage of the three months of "flowkey" that came with my keyboard, that the book and the app have a game plan integrated in the lessons!

So now, only two months after Keyboard-san's arrival, I've put the books away and started plinking along with flowkey, working my way through Piano for Adults and Hanon, and watching Zach Evans' Become a Piano Superhero videos.

To be or not to be vaccinated, a cultural dysfunction?

I was talking with my daughter and we disagree about COVID-19 vaccinations.

I support a strategy of pushing vaccinations as a way to minimize the number of people who are hospitalized and/or die, we should focus our efforts on vaccinating residents 35 and older. They account for 97% of the hospitalizations and deaths.

My daughter was pointing out that the COVID-19 vaccines have caused heart problems. It turns out that she's correct, there have been cases of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccinations among people less than 30.  Here are three articles that address the issue:

• from Harvard Medical School publications
• from a website called Science Based Medicine
• from CNBC

For people less than 30, if they want a vaccination but are anxious about their heart, they should consider the J&J vaccine.

Our discussion mad me realize how disgruntled I am that that our 'culture' has politicized wearing masks and getting vaccines.  These health strategies were turned into symbols that, because of loyalty, cannot be disentangled. Our inability as a culture to address health is dysfunctional. 

Judging the last paragraph to be a rant, I decided to take a step back and look at our country's health via the death and mortality data for the US and the world. At first, based on comparing the causes of death in the US to the world, I thought I was ranting without merit. But then I noticed an aberration. The US has a higher mortality rate for cancer than other high income countries. 

Our cultural dysfunction has a physical manifestation: 

we are eating ourselves from the inside out.

Learning to be a portrait artist

So I want to be a portrait artist. You might think it's awfully late in life for a 73 year old man to want to do this, but, hey! Why not?

To be a portrait artist, you need to have an intuitive understanding of the head. Now I've been to art classes and learned to draw the head by getting a plastic model of the skull, drawing it from various angles, studying the muscles that control the features, and doing studies of the face in the throes of various emotions. My portraits improved, but it wasn't enough.  I don't have an intuitive feel for the parts that create a person's identity.

To improve my skills I found YouTube videos that help:

• Proko's Quickly Draw Heads with Loomis Method, Part 1
• Proko's Draw Any Head Type with the Loomis Method, Part 2
• Proko's Intuitive Portrait Sketching with the Loomis Method, Part 3

After watching these I wanted to go to the source and was able to borrow Drawing the Head and Hands by Andrew Loomis from my library.  Originally published in 1943, the edition I looked at was published in 2011

As Proko mentions in his videos, Andrew has done an analysis of the head and the features. Luckily he shared his results in his book and provides maps that help locate the features on men and women in each stage of development:

• Toddler
• Child
• Teenager
• Adult

I saw these when I was much younger and the arrogant me didn't see much value in them. The only thing I remembered was that the ear is as long as the nose (brow to tip of nose). The older, wiser me reviewed them again this week and, after investing the time to make a study of each, found the gold: understanding how the features "move" from toddler to adult (drawing cute kids starts with getting their features placed correctly . . . Who knew!)

TODDLER

YOUNG BOY

ADULT MALE

ADULT FEMALE

Here is a link to some of the pages in Andrew's book.

And here is a link to a 3D version of the Andrew Loomis Head:

Andrew Loomis Head V2.0 by Vivek Aakash on Sketchfab

I'm optimistic that learning from Andrew Loomis will improve my portraits.

Tracking COVID-19 Vaccinations and Deaths

Each day I check to see how we Americans are doing on 'conquering' COVID-19 by checking with the NYTimes for The Latest Case Count and then to See How the Vaccine Rollout is Going. And on a weekly basis I get a breakdown of coronavirus cases and deaths by age group to update my blog page.  From this information I can intuit the progress the vaccinations are making towards helping us manage the pandemic in the U.S..

But I want to know more.

This is my attempt to get a handle on how vaccinations in US is affecting the number of COVID-19 related deaths by looking at the deaths and vaccinations by age group.

According to the CDC's COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States, here is a breakdown of vaccinations by age (18+ and 65+) as of June 30, 2021:

Age Group	Population	Vaccinations		Percent of Population
		1 dose	2 dose*	1 dose	2 dose*
TOTAL	332,410,303	181,339,416	155,884,601	54.6%	46.9%
18 years and older	259,016,872	172,295,929	149,112,608	66.5%	57.6%
65 years and older	54,681,549	48,223,331	42,846,087	88.2%	78.4%
* Includes J&J vaccinations

For a more granular view of the distributions of vaccinations, USA Facts have graphs showing the distribution by sex, age, and ethnicity in its article US COVID-19 Vaccine Progress. I've captured the age distribution numbers from the graph and put them in the following table:

Age Group	Percent of Population		Population	Vaccinations
	1 dose	2 dose		1 dose	2 dose
0-17 years	11.3%	8.3%	72,445,882	8,170,896	5,999,803
18-24 years	44.3%	35.9%	30,596,589	13,554,913	10,974,100
25-39 years	48.8%	41.1%	68,408,885	33,398,815	28,136,891
40-49 years	57.9%	49.7%	40,581,517	23,493,511	20,180,817
50-64 years	68.5%	60.0%	62,943,343	43,102,144	37,757,021
65-74 years	84.2%	74.8%	31,576,388	26,597,910	23,614,401
75 years and over	81.7%	72.4%	22,498,818	18,370,827	16,285,109
No age info			3,358,880	14,650,400	12,936,459
TOTAL	54.6%	46.9%	332,410,303	181,339,416	155,884,601

To examine coronavirus deaths, I started tracking the week-to-week differences from my age distribution reports. Here is a table that shows percent increase or decrease over the four weeks ending April 28 and May 29, 2021 compared to previous four weeks alongside current vaccination percentage:

COVID-19 Deaths for last 4 weeks compared to previous 4 weeks				Vaccinations administered
Age Group	% Change 4/28/21	% Change 5/26/21	% Change 6/23/21	Percent of Population
				1 dose	2 dose
0-17 years	-18%	-26%	4%	24.9%	21.7%
18-29 years	-27%	11%	-19%	43.1%	34.2%
30-39 years	-16%	4%	-24%	47.8%	39.7%
40-49 years	-27%	-4%	-28%	56.9%	48.2%
50-64 years	-32%	-3%	-35%	67.6%	58.6%
65-74 years	-40%	-12%	-36%	83.7%	74.0%
75 years and over	-41%	-15%	-40%	81.1%	71.7%
All ages	-38%	-11%	-37%	53.5%	45.36%

So what does this table tell me? On the plus side it's telling me that COVID-19 related are trending downward but there are some hiccoughs (Note: % change not negative for 0-17 for four weeks ending 6/23/21).  

5-Minute Watercolor Review

5-Minute Watercolor 

by Samantha Nielsen

2018, Quarto Publishing

A 128 page book packed full with ideas makes a good introduction to this wonderful medium. I've been looking at lots of watercolor books recently because I want to teach my grandchildren how to use watercolors. People say it's a difficult medium, and, it is, if you unreasonably expect to master it all at once. Samantha does a masterful job of serving her watercolor wisdom in 4 main meals (Chapters: Tools, Easy Techniques, Applying Your Techniques, and Take It Further), and bite size pieces within each meal.

Since I'm focused on doing individual lessons, her bite size pieces under Easy Techniques provides me with an outline for lesson plans with my granddaughters:

• Washes
• Wet-in-wet
• Blending
• Basic bloom
• Pulling from color
• Dry-brush
• Simple splatter
• Tape
• Masking fluid
• Fast ways to lift paint
• Layering and glazing
• Basic scumbling
• Paper and gravity
• Warm and cool colors
• Easy ways to gain brush control
• Ink line and watercolor wash
• Light to dark

That's 17 topics, each of which Samantha covers in a 2-page spread providing enough directions to get you started. 

Unfortunately, if you're new to watercolor you'll need a guide to get the most nutrition from Samantha's next two meals. 

Her Chapter 3, Applying Your Techniques, is packed full of good advice and pointers, but if you're looking for 'how to' instructions you'll need to go elsewhere. The internet, especially YouTube, has many show-n-tells that can provide you with needed instructions.

Her Chapter 4, Take It Further, gives you ideas for doing just that. I appreciate Samantha's closing her book with a summary of Key Elements, but it brings up a minor 'niggling' I have about her sequencing. Six of these Key Elements (Simple Shapes, Sketch It, Value, Light to Dark, Layering, and Paint It!), because they are so important, would provide a good review at the beginning of the previous chapter, Applying Your Techniques. Conversely, the first topic she covers in chapter 3 is 'What is plein air?'. Plein Air is an advanced topic and would have better placed as a great lead into Chapter 4, Take it Further. 

So, if you're looking for a pointers on how to teach watercolor, Samantha Nielsen's 5-Minute Watercolor is a good bet. If you are looking to learn watercolor, the first two chapters of her book (TOOLS and EASY TECHNIQUES) can get you started, but you'll need guidance to digest her last two, valuable chapters.

Sunday cartoon

 

The Natural Way to Draw, a review

The Natural Way to Draw: a working plan for art study by Kimon Nicolaides (1941, Houghton Muffin Company)

Kimon provides a pedological plan for a year long immersion into learning to draw. He uses the analogy of learning correct breathing before singing a song as a means to encourage readers to learn to draw before they produce “drawings" and “paintings”. There are 68 exercises for the student to do in a mindful way. The exercises are aimed toward increasing the student’s skills sequentially.

Here is a listing of his exercises for Section 1:

1. Contour - when Kimon says 'contour' in the first chapter he means what has come to be known as 'blind contour'.  The student focuses on the contour of the model, places the pencil on the paper and moves the pencil simultaneously with his eyes as his eyes trace along the model's edge.
2. Gesture - draw the action you fel as you look at the model. These are short (1 to 2 minute) drawings. Kimon suggests that you go to where people are gathered and moving to do gesture drawings (a playground, a busy walkway, etc)
3. Cross contour - the inclusion of lines that follow the contour of the form going from one side of the model's body to the other: "the line of a cross contour follows around a shape of the figure somewhat as a barrel hoop follows the rounded shape of a barrel."

He wants the art student to learn to 'see' and not just the visual world. With the gesture drawings he invites the student to draw the energy of the pose. He has other exercises for the student to draw the weight of the model and to use their pencil, crayon, charcoal, and ink to 'sculpt' the model on the page.

In addition he provides a means for the budding artist to train their imagination

1. Potential gesture - Imagine what the model will do next and draw it
2. Memory - the model takes three 320 second poses and steps down. Draw the three poses.
3. Reverse - while looking at the model, draw the model's mirror image.
4. Right angle - while looking at the model, imagine seeing him/her from a right angle to your line of sight and draw  that view
5. Back - with your back to the model, take glances over your shoulder and draw
6. Daily composition - a 15 minute gesture drawing of a scene from your past

Kimon leads the student to use various media::

1. Charcoal
2. Lithography crayon
3. Ink
4. Watercolor
5. Oil paint

He proposes that the student artist plan to do 3 hours of drawing each day, five days a week. He provides a 5 day schedule at the beginning of each section (chapter). There are 25 sections so he gives the reader a 325 hour plan for his/her course of study. Here is Kimon's Schedule 1:

	A	B	C	D	E
30 minutes	Contour  (1)	Gestures  (25)	Gestures  (25)	Gestures  (25)	Gestures  (25)
30 minutes	Contour  (1)	Contour  (1)	Contour  (1)	Contour  (1)	Cross Contour  (1)
15 minutes	Contour  (1)	Gestures  (15)	Gestures  (15)	Gestures  (15)	Gestures  (15)
15 minutes	Rest	Rest	Rest	Rest	Rest
30 minutes	Contour  (1)	Gestures  (25)	Gestures  (25)	Gestures  (25)	Gestures  (25)
60 minutes	Contour  (1 or 2)	Contour  (1 or 2)	Contour  (1 or 2)	Contour  (1 or 2)	Contour  (1 or 2)

Obviously, to take advantage of his wisdom, you'll need to incorporate these exercises into your own schedule.

Beginning with Schedule 5 he encourages you to do a Daily Composition, a small (5 X 7) memory drawing of some scene (figure(s) and context) which you witnessed in the last 24 hours. This is a fast gesture drawing taking no more than 15 minutes.

Here are some figure drawing YouTube playlists of timed art model sessions:

1. (NON-NUDE SERIES) Daily Life Drawing Sessions - fourteen 35 minute sessions
2. Friday Evening  Figure Drawing - forty-eight 1 hour or 2-1/2 hour sessions
3. Drawing Sessions - eight 35 minute sessions
4. Daily Life Drawing Sessions - eleven 25 minute sessions and twenty-three 35 minute sessions
5. Figure Drawing Sessions - six 25 minute sessions (There are 11 in the playlist, but 5 are in other playlists)
6. Human Anatomy for Artists - eleven short videos (17 seconds to 5 minutes)
7. Female Anatomy for Artists - twenty videos, six 35 minutes and the rest between 1 and 2-1/2 minutes.

This is 135 hours of drawing (Let's see, if I do 30 minutes a day for 5 days a week, it will only take me 54 weeks!)

Kimon's objective is not to have the reader learn how to draw but learn how to learn to draw. The old adage of giving someone a fish or teaching someone to fish comes to mind. It's a grand objective, but I don't think he accomplishes it. His work is well organized, purposely leading the student from exercise to exercise. He encourages the reader to take their time and be mindful (for someone like me, that means to not be task focused but look, see, and observe what is going on in front of me and differentiate that from what is going on inside of me) and from this the student may learn how to learn to draw. Good luck getting mindfulness from a book (although, I must say that the last five paragraphs of his Introduction made as much sense to me as a zen koan, which, I understand, is a key to mindfulness.)

Aside from that, the book, if it's used, is well worth the price of admission.

As of March 15, 2021, available at

Abe Books for $4.65 or $6

Thrift Books for $10 or $12

Barnes & Noble for $19